"You don't mean to tell me you didn't know that?" Uncle Dick was as surprised as his niece. "Why, they shipped me into this town to read law with old Judge Clay before they found there was no law in me, and your father first met your mother one Sunday when he drove twenty miles from the farm to see me."
Betty was still pondering over this when they reached the Arnold front door and Mrs. Arnold, flustered and delighted, answered Mr. Gordon's knock.
"Sit right down on the front porch where it's cool," she insisted cordially. "I've just put on my dinner, and you'll have time for a good talk. No, Betty, there isn't a thing you can do to help me—you entertain your uncle."
But Betty, who knew that excitement always affected Mrs. Arnold's bump of neatness, determined to set the table, partly to help her hostess and partly, it must be confessed, to make sure that the knives and forks and napkins were in their proper places.
"I'm sure I don't know where those boys can be," scolded the flushed but triumphant mother, as she tested the flaky chicken dumplings and pronounced the dinner "done to a turn." "We'll just sit down without them, and it'll do 'em good," she decided.
Betty ran through the hall to call her uncle. Just as she reached the door two forlorn figures toiled up the porch steps.
"Where's ma?" whispered Ted, for the moment not seeing the stranger and appealing to Betty, who stood in the doorway. "In the kitchen? We thought maybe we could sneak up the front stairs."
Ted was plastered from head to foot with slimy black mud, and George, his younger edition, was draped only in a wet bath towel. Both boys clung to their rough fishing rods, and Ted still carried the dirty tin can that had once held bait.
"I should say," observed Mr. Gordon in his deep voice, "that we had been swimming against orders. Things usually happen in such cases."
"Oh, gee!" sighed Ted despairingly. "Who's that? Company?"